“The first railway in Csömör” – “Greetings from Csömör!” Postcard from ca. 1896

Fifteen years ago when we came to this village, the old people still spoke among themselves in Slovak, or as they told, in “Tót”, thus making a sharp distinction between the literary Slovak language – which they of course knew and read – and the archaic dialect they brought with themselves from the northeastern Carpathians when, in the early 1700s, they descended to the hills around what is now Budapest to repopulate the villages destroyed during the previous hundred and fifty years of Ottoman domination. Ľudovit Štúr’s Nárečia Slovenskuo which more than a century later, in 1844 proclaimed the autonomy of Slovak language and established its grammar, already did not reach them. They have kept speaking until this day their dialect, close to Rusyn and enriched both by the language of their 17th-century Lutheran Czech hymn and prayer books and by lots of Hungarian terms. I also picked it up from them much earlier than I learned literary Slovak on the language course run by the local self-government of Slovak ethnic minority.

Slovak women in Csömör on the Ecumenical Prayer Day traditionally organized on 20 August (2010)

This language variant, however, exists only in an oral form. They consider its written form the literary Slovak they encounter in the newspaper Ľudové noviny circulated by the minority self-government, in the books sent from Slovakia by the relatives resettled there during the forced population exchange between 1947 and 1949, or in the minority language courses introduced in the school from the 1950s. However, recently I have discovered with surprise that it used to have a written form of its own which was in use since their arrival to this place for more than a century until it was replaced by Hungarian as an official language.

Csömör, Parish Hall, 1905

While working on the homepage of the local Lutheran church and collecting materials for the historical part of it, I discovered on the attic of the vicarage an old handwritten book describing in Latin the history of the local Lutheran community since their arrival in the early 1700s until the mid-1800s. This manuscript offered so many new data on the history of the parish and of the village that we decided to publish it in its entirety in a separate library of the Lutheran homepage as a facsimile with transcription and translation. This library was solemnly opened today, on the anniversary of the church’s foundation by pastor Gyula Johann.

Head of the first page of the Lutheran community’s handwritten history, from here

On the first few pages of the manuscript the local schoolmaster Ján Klinger summarized in 1798 the history of the community in the eighty years that had passed since their settlement in Csömör. He also quoted a number of since then lost documents from the archive of the vicarage, including the two letters of invitation sent by the community in 1722 to their future pastor Samuel Jacobeus and then in 1793 to him as a schoolmaster. While such letters, describing in detail the provisions offered by the community, were usually written in Latin at that time, these two, as a curiosity, were composed in the local Slovak dialect of the community mixed with old church Czech. It is this mixture and the local terms that make its translation difficult, so we will be grateful for any correction by our readers.

Letter of invitation to pastor Samuel Jacobeus and to the Lutheran schoolmaster, Csömör, ca. 1722 (copy, 1798), from here

1. For autumn they sow for him 10 bushels of grain; for spring, 4 bushels
2. Every person who has his own plow gives him 2 bushels, who works with another’s plow 1½ bushel, a day laborer 1 bushel
3. 8 good cartful of wood
4. 8 good summer cartful of hay
5. Tallow for candles 8 pounds, and the tongue of every cattle
6. The shepherds are obliged to pasture for him for free, as the pastor will also serve them for free
7. For funerals with sermon [?] 1 forint [?], for half-funeral [?] 10 groschen, for the inscription [?] 6 groschen
8. For wedding and announcement 6 groschen, and for the introduction of the new bride, milk loaf, roast and wash cloth
9. For childbirth blessing [baptism?] bread, rooster and one grosch.
10. Gifts on the [funeral] anniversaries, plus the colledae collected by the parish-clerks
11. On Three Kings [Epiphany] the pastor himself goes to colleda, and on Corpus Christi the schoolmaster.
12. His garden, hemp field, cabbage-patch and vineyard will be fenced and dug up for him
13. A rooster from every house
14. Every widow will weave for him
15. Grape harvesters will give him an early gift of the harvest

Provisions for the schoolmaster

1. For autumn they sow for him 5 bushels, for spring 3 bushels
2. 3 cartful of wood and 3 of hay
3. Who has his own plow will give him a half bushel, those working on shares and day laborers according to their wealth
4. For funerals with sermon 6 groschen, for half-funerals [?] 5 groschen, for valedictory address 4 more groschen
5. A garden for vegetables and a hemp field
6. Cantacýe [?] for the anniversary feasts
7. From grammatists [upper classes] yearly 1 forint, from donatists [lower classes] 18 groschen, from initialists [pupils learning the alphabet] 14 groschen, to which are to be added the things necessary in the school as well as firewood

Provisions of the pastor from the curacy of Palota

1. One cartful of summer hay and one cartful of good reed
2. They sow 2 bushels of barley for him, which they are obliged to take care of and to carry to Csömör
3. They give one bushel of rye per plow, and who has no plow a half bushel
4. For baptism, blessing, wedding, funerals and other priestly services they give the same as those of Csömör, and something more as thanksgiving

As everyone works, therefore everyone deserves a wage. * So we, inhabitants of Csömör following the Confession of Augsburg (= the Lutheran creed), when inviting the respectable and erudite Ján Klinger as our future schoolmaster, oblige ourselves with this letter to give him payment both for his teacher’s and cantor’s duties. And it will consist in the following things.

I. For his teacher’s duties

1. We will be obliged to plow up, cultivate and care for his land sufficient for 4 bushels of autumn and 4 bushels of spring sowing.
2. 3 complete cartful of hay.
3. We will plow up his hemp field, cabbage-patch and cornfield, and will dig up his garden. [In Latin:] In 1798 was added also the bean field, called pasŭlisko.
4. 10 groschen from every student which each of them has to pay in the week of the day of St. Joseph.

II. For his cantor’s duties

5. In cash 15 Rhenish forints.
6. From every complete farmer two bushels of cleaned rye, from those working on shares one and half bushel, from day laborers one bushel to be brought to him and poured together on the same day.
7. Three complete heaps of firewood and lop as a payment.
8. For funerals with singing five groschen and for the valedictory sermon one gold.
9. Cantacye [?] for all three feasts, on the day of Blaise, Gregory and Martin.
10. On the feast of Christmas the usual hospitality.
11. A collecta of wine, that is at least 4 quarterns from every complete farmer, 2 quarterns from those on shares and 1 quartern from day laborers.
12. We will also carry [his grain] to the mill and pour it on the millstones.

Besides the two letters of invitation we also find some Slovak terms in the description of the lands of the church which specifies their location with their locally used Slovak names. Note the term pri forrášy, ‘at the spring’ borrowed from Hungarian forrás instead of literary Slovak prameň.

7. Lands and fields. – The schoolmaster sows four Pressburg bushels in the autumn and four bushels in the spring. These lands are not marked off in one piece, but they join the lands of the village. – A garden under the school, furthermore a bean field, hemp field, cabbage-patch and buckwheat field have also been marked off for him. Their present location is found as follows: a) The garden laying under the school is seven and a half fathoms large, 33 fathoms long. – b) The bean field (as they say, v starých konopistkách [Slovak: in the old hemp field]) is 5 fathoms large and 5 feet long. – c) The smaller hemp field (niže cesti, pri forrášy [over the street, at the spring]) is 3 fathoms large. – d.) The larger hemp field is 5 and a half fathoms large (and is called pri kapustniskách [at the cabbage-patch]). – e.) The cabbage-patch (z konča kapustnisky [from the end of the cabbage-patch]) is 3 fathoms long and 2 feet large. – f.) The buckwheat field (nad vinicami [over the vineyards]) is 12 fathoms large.

Horsemen surveying the fields of Csömör

This unexpectedly discovered earliest linguistic record of the Slovak language in Csömör deserved to be included also in the calendar of the village traditionally distributed for Christmas by the town hall to the households of the village, and designed by us for the first time in this year.

8 comentarios:

kapustnjsk most likely stands for kapustnísk (GEN.PL), NOM.PL being kapustnisko, so "at one end of the cabbage patches". z konča may also refer to the far end of something, in a context like this, usually from the vantage point of the church.

Cantacye stands for kantácie (syn. festivácie) which refers to either to going door to door and singing Christmas carols for a small sum and/or food or the proceedings therefrom, essentially a Christmas bonus for the village teacher.

To be quite honest, without the context, I would read it ručnjk = ručník = "wash cloth". Then again, it doesn't make much sense in the context, plus the fourth letter really looks a lot more like the other u's than n'. But the fifth letter is j which stands for the long vowel [i:] and the vowel combination -uí- is virtually non-existent in either Slovak or Czech. I'll check all the historical and dialectal dictionaries, but for now, ručník seems like the safest bet.

Yes, you are right: it must be rather ručník, as ‘j’ is overall written as ‘g’. And it is not excluded that he received a regular gift of wash cloth from the members of the congregation (as he was not married at the time of the document, so no wife wove for him, he had to rely on them for that).

Just to be on the safe side, I checked everything at my disposal and got nothing, so ručník it is.By the way, there's one detail that had me stumped for a second: Rusyn- or close-to-Rusyn-speaking Lutherans, really? That is literally unheard of and I'm quoting one of the authorities on the ethnic and confessional makeup of Slovakia here :)Were the original immigrants Lutherans, too? Do you have any idea as to where exactly they came from?

Thank you very much for cross-checking it. I think ručník fits perfectly in this context. I hope I can count on your careful look when publishing futher old Slovak/biblical Czech texts of the village chronicle.

No, no Rusyn-speaking Lutherans: that would be just as absurd as Romanian-speaking Calvinists (although these latter did exist for a while in the 16th century and even printed some important books). It was a Slovak researcher of Slovak dialects in Hungary who told me that the dialect of Csömör/Čemer is nearer to Rusyn/Lemko than most Slovakian dialects. Plus, I negotiated the rent of a house for a Russian student of mine and his family in the village. His mother is Ukrainian, so he perfectly spoke both languages, and while he had found Slovak more or less a foreign language when traveling together in Slovakia, in my village he could communicate perfectly with local people, and he told that the reason was that they spoke a dialect much closer to Ukrainian than literary Slovak.

At the time I wrote this post and published the first pages of the chronicle on the site of the local Lutheran community, the general conviction of the village’s Slovak community was that they had arrived here from the northeastern Carpathians, above Bardejov (which would also justify their contact with Rusyns in the region of Svidník). As the Lutheran community of the village was hit by a plague in 1740, and in consequence they lost their status of an autonomous parish and were attached as a filia to the nearby Cinkota/Lingota (see on the 1781 map included in the post), we had no registers of births in the village for two centuries. Apparently it was me the first person who, in this February, went to Cinkota to check their earliest registers which clearly showed that the first Slovak settlers were invited to the empty Csömör by its landlord Tamás Beniczky from Dolná Mičiná above Banská Bystrica where a Beniczky castle is still standing. Inspired by this discovery, in March a group of our Slovak folk dancers and folk costume collectors went to Dolná Mičiná where they already found the old cemetery destroyed, but many people remembered that our family names were once common in their village. As a consequence, an agreement of twin towns is now in preparation between our villages.

I hope I can count on your careful lookOf course, I'd be happy to help. And be sure to let me know if you need demographic data or alike, I know people.

It was a Slovak researcher of Slovak dialects in Hungary who told me that the dialect of Csömör/Čemer is nearer to Rusyn/Lemko than most Slovakian dialects.Not to speak ill of my colleagues, but to some Slovak dialectologists, the presence of some features (most notably 1SG.PRES. suffix -u instead of -m) is enough to start drawing parallels with Rusyn when in fact this feature is typical of a number of Eastern dialects. Same goes for intelligibility with Ukrainian which, I've always thought, is in this case a function of lexeme choice rather than anything else.

they had arrived here from the northeastern Carpathians, above BardejovThat would make sense - right above Bardejov is where the Eastern Slovak Lutheran belt starts. Based on historical data, I think I can pin down 3 or 4 most likely candidates. Let me check the data and get back to you.

Thanks for reminding me of this great story, Studiolum! I must have forgotten about "the Lutheran belt" completely ... should have recalled it when I recently discovered that one of my cancer families, Lutherans from Pennsylvania with a common German surname, descend from immigrants from Hungary (how strange, I thought, Lutheranism isn't the religion which first comes to mind when you think about historic Hungary). Stranger still, the share genetic footprint with two even larger ethnic German mega-families - but these other families were Catholic and hailed from nearby hamlets in a rural canton of Diekirch in Luxembourg. I have no doubts that the Luxembourgers will turn out to be blood relatives if one sifts through the old parish books ... but could the Austro-Hungarian Lutherans be a branch of the same family tree?